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ContractsContracts FeaturesFeatures ProductsProducts CommentComment

Technology & The Transformation of Frontline ServicesTechnology & The Transformation of Frontline Services

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Working Securely, TogetherWorking Securely, Together- ITU Live debates frontline collaboration and technology- ITU Live debates frontline collaboration and technology

Setting a Free ExampleSetting a Free Example- Government practices what it preaches on free data- Government practices what it preaches on free data

Nowhere to HideNowhere to Hide- Data plays a crucial role in the fi ght against fraud- Data plays a crucial role in the fi ght against fraud

PLUS: News Update, eLearning Debate, Standardisation Vs. Innovation, PLUS: News Update, eLearning Debate, Standardisation Vs. Innovation,

View on Westminster, View on Westminster, Product Notes & Contracts Won. Product Notes & Contracts Won.

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UKauthorITy.tvUKauthorITy.tv- In their own words... ITU and UKauthorITy.com - In their own words... ITU and UKauthorITy.com

launch video news and interview channel launch video news and interview channel

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July/August 20112 UKauthorITy IT in Use

ISSN 2046 7133

Editor & Publisher Helen Olsen E: Helen@infopub.co.uk T: 01273 273941

Contributing Editor Tim Hampson E: Tim@infopub.co.uk T: 01865 790675

Special Michael CrossCorrespondent E: Michael@infopub.co.uk

Advertising & Ann Campbell-SmithCirculation E: Ann@infopub.co.uk T: 01983 812623

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UKauthorITy

UKauthorITy comprises the online news service UKauthorITy.com, the video news service UKau-thorITy.tv, the market-leading IT in Use magazine and ITU Live webinars, and the market information newsletter, UKauthorITy Report (formerly the Town Hall newsletter). Our core editorial focus is the use of technology to both improve public service quality and reduce service delivery costs across the UK public sector: Central Government, Local Government, Police, Fire and Health.

Editorial

Editorial for all UKauthorITy titles is written in house by managing editor, Helen Olsen, and editors, Tim Hampson and Michael Cross. Relevant news releases should be sent by email to the editor, Helen Olsen: Helen@infopub.co.uk

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All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part, stor-age in a retrieval system or transmission in any form, of any material in this publication is prohibited without prior written consent from the Editor. The views expressed by the Editors and writers are their own. Whilst every care is taken, the publishers cannot be responsible for any errors in articles or listings. Articles written by contributors do not necessar-ily express the views of their employing organisation. The Editor reserves the right to edit any submissions prior to publication.

Comment 3Will Sharing become the norm in public sector ICT? Helen Olsen outlines an editorial research project which aims to fi nd out.

News Update 3-6 / 8-9UKauthorITy.tv launches; local councillor becomes government’s new head of ICT futures; cloud news, transparency and digital services in our regular round-up of sector news.

ITU Live: Technology & Collaboration 7Can technology enable the public sector to collaborate - securely and cost effectively - both across and between organisations? Helen Olsen asks the ITU Live panel.

Setting the Free Data Example 10Michael Cross welcomes government’s eagerness to practice what it preaches when it comes to transparency.

Debate: What Comes First: Training or Technology? 11How has technology impacted the learning environment? Helen Olsen invites key eLearning thought leaders to the debate table.

Standardisation Vs. Innovation 12Big society IT for the police could lead us back to the future, warns Michael Cross.

Full House, Fulsome Debate 13Hacking and foam pie throwing aside, Tim Hampson looks at NHS reforms, localism and digital strategy inside the house.

Nowhere to Hide 14The key in the fi ght against fraud and error is data, and collaboration, says Helen Olsen.

Product & Company Notes 15 Contract Roundup 16-18

On the CoverSetting the Free Data Example.

See page 10

©iStockphoto.com/Henrik Jonsson

July/August 2011

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Contents

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July/August 2011 3UKauthorITy IT in Use

NEWS UPDATE

COMMENT: Will sharing become the norm? The conversations that I and my editorial team are having with frontline organisations across the country are increasingly of how services

can be maintained in this age of austerity. Shared services, underpinned by technology, are seen by many as a saviour solution, but there is much uncertainty as to the right way forward. And most of those involved realise that they have just one chance to get this right.

So, after decades of talk, just how fast is the sector actually moving towards shared services? What, if any, benefi ts are being gained today? And how can we share the knowledge base that must rapidly be built?

UKauthorITy and IT in Use (ITU) magazine, in partnership with Capita and with support from Socitm, is undertaking a major quantitative research exercise this summer to answer these questions. Senior offi cers from all frontline and central government public services have been invited to take part in this ground breaking research exercise in a bid to draw a line in the sand and to provide a benchmark for progress in this vital activity.

Backing the research, Geoff Connell, divisional director of ICT at Newham and head of business systems at Havering, said that in this period of fi nancial austerity, “Authorities must work together in order to deliver high quality services within ever reducing budgets. Opportunities such as sharing of services, jointly procuring solutions and learning from each other’s successes and failures are only possible when there is an understanding of what we are all doing and planning. I therefore welcome this survey as a great opportunity to help us coordinate our activities.”

Jos Creese, Socitm past-president and CIO at Hampshire County Council, added, “This research should give us all some invaluable insights into preparedness, plans and progress towards signifi cant changes in public service delivery... and at a time when we need it most.”

Operational director at project sponsor, Capita, Paul Millard, said that as public sector budgets are “squeezed to deliver the same services for less, councils across the country are exploring ways to meet the challenging targets”. Creativity and innovation are key, he believes, and his company has seen an increase in the number of councils joining forces to share services and resource: “The landscape is changing rapidly.” He added, “This survey is intended to build a representative picture of the changes in public service delivery, the challenges ahead, how councils plan to tackle them and what steps have already been put in place.”

The results of this project will be reported in the September/October issue of ITU magazine and debated in an ITU Live webinar on 14th September. To register to view the webinar email: Ann@infopub.co.uk

Helen Olsen, Editor

MARK BRETT, HEAD OF INFORMA-TION ASSURANCE FOR SOCITM, talks to UKauthorITy.tv about data loss and the need to get to grips with data security in an age of digital service delivery and a mobile workforce.

CIO, DAVID WILDE, talks to Helen Olsen about his move to Essex and pro-gress on the tri-borough initiative he leaves behind at Westminster.

PETER BOLE, DIRECTOR OF ICT AT KENT, tells UKauthorITy.tv about development of the county’s pioneering Public Service Network - laying the foun-dations for joint working and shared services county-wide.

SOCITM PRESIDENT, GLYN EVANS, explains how the society’s new local ICT strat-

egy, ‘Planting the Flag’, can help

frontline organisations to n o t only build the right infrastructure f o r

their own unique local circumstances but also ensure they align with pan-public sector ICT policy and strategy.

GILLES POLIN, ADOBE’S HEAD OF GOVERN-MENT FOR EUROPE, discusses the evolution of egovernment across the region and outlines

where Adobe’s new Digital Enterprise Platform can help governments to build citizen friendly, effi cient processes from a base of legacy systems.

LIAM MAXWELL, LEAD MEMBER FOR POLICY AT THE ROYAL BOROUGH OF WINDSOR AND MAIDENHEAD, explains how his council is imple-menting ‘Better for Less’ with innovative and agile use of technology.

Coming soon on UKauthorITy.tv

• Mark O’Neill, Government Skunkworks • Government deputy CIO, Bill McCluggage • PSN delivery director, Kenny Robertson • Qamar Yunus, government lead on open

source policy in the ERG

IT in Use magazine and UKauthorITy.com have launched UKauthorITy.tv, capturing interviews and news from the key infl uencers in public sector ICT. Visit www.UKauthorITy.tv

July/August 20114 UKauthorITy IT in Use

NEWS UPDATE

Cambridgeshire’s PSN

Cambridgeshire’s councils and other public sector organisations are set to

see major savings and benefi ts from a new Cambridgeshire Public Sector Network (CPSN) contract.

Awarded to Virgin Media Business in a county-led partnership procurement the new network will provide a foundation for partnership working by linking public ser-vices across the area as well as providing increased bandwidth for more than 200 schools.

Cambridgeshire councillor, Linda Oliver, said that the Cambridgeshire PSN agreement would provide “faster, more cost-effective and secure networks that will enable public services across Cambridgeshire to deliver more effi cient services. Shared networking will keep costs down, delivering more for less while providing real benefi ts for our communities.”

The partnership currently comprises Cambridgeshire, Fenland, Huntingdonshire, South Cambridgeshire, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Fire & Rescue Service, and the Cambridge Citizen’s Advice Bureau.

Virgin has also signed a deal with Westminster - a £190m pan-London IT framework for a PSN-compliant Next Generation Network resource that could act as a one-stop procure-ment shop to London’s public sector for buying phone, data, video, CCTV and Wi-Fi services.

Councillor is government’s new chief of ICT futures

Liam Maxwell, who has been appointed to advise the government on how it can best use innovative technology, was

a forthright critic of the last government’s ICT strategy - drafted by his new boss, Ian Watmore.

As head of IT at Eton and former elected member for Windsor and Maidenhead, Maxwell will bring welcome local govern-ment expertise to the Whitehall-dominated Government Digital

Service. One observer commented: “It is a really positive move - someone with actual experience of running a local authority/front-line service. He is open-minded and seems keen to avoid supplier lock-in as technology moves into an era of commoditisation.”

Maxwell is known as an enthusiast for open source technology and for citizens taking control of their personal data: his borough is piloting Mydex, a novel model of identity man-agement designed to put the citizen in charge.

Welcoming him to the role, Ian Watmore said that Maxwell’s insight and knowledge would make him “a valuable source to the team” and acknowledged his “strong track record of delivering success in government ICT” and “signifi cant experience of turning the theory into practice”.

From September, Maxwell will provide exper-tise on how government can use innovative new technology to deliver better, cheaper solutions - including efforts to:

• develop new, more fl exible ways of delivery in government;

• increase the drive towards open stand-ards and open source software;

• help SMEs to enter the government marketplace;

• maintain a horizon scan of future tech-nologies and methods.

He set out his thinking in a 2009 paper for the Centre for Policy Studies: ‘It’s ours: Why we, not government, must own our data’. In the paper, which has strongly infl uenced the current government’s ICT strategy, he con-nects open data, citizen empowerment and open standards. “By imposing the require-ment that people can, if they wish, host data with a trusted... provider rather than the sole government supplier, the IT used to deliver public services will have to utilise open data standards. This will, of course, also lead to a less costly, more agile and more effective pro-vision of IT and of public services.”

Maxwell now has a year, under the eye of Cabinet Offi ce minister Francis Maude, to turn that vision into reality.

Watch UKauthorITy.tv’s interview with Liam Maxwell, as councillor of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead: www.UKauthorITy.tv

Foundations for public data corporation

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has taken over responsi-

bility for three big providers of public sector information as a fi rst step towards the crea-tion of the new Public Data Corporation. Land Registry of England and Wales, Ordnance Survey and the Met Offi ce are all moving from their current sponsoring departments in what appears to be a rationalisation exercise ahead of the creation of the new corpora-tion, which will fall under the wing of BIS. The three all operate on a quasi-commercial model by selling information and services.

Among the datasets to be handled by the new corporation is the new National Address Gazetteer. Under current plans, this will be free only to the public sector. Edward Davey, BIS minister, and Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Offi ce, will jointly chair a transi-tion board to consider the data corporation’s membership, structure and governance.

Offshoring? Think of the bad headlines…

Public bodies considering offshoring IT ser-vices should consult with ministers about

the potential for damaging headlines, accord-ing to new advice published by the Cabinet Offi ce. The guidance on ICT offshoring, from the government’s CIO council, also recom-mends “early engagement with your press and media team”.

While the Cabinet Offi ce says that the guid-ance introduces no new policy, its publication will be interpreted as a nudge to public bodies to consider offshoring. “In order to maximise value for money in procuring services, and uphold their duty to safeguard public funds CIOs will want to ensure that potential sup-pliers are aware that offshore solutions will be considered,” the guidance states. But it also warns offi cials to consider the risks - for example the possible loss of control, and extra expense of managing an offshore supplier, as well as security risks. The document also says that offshore suppliers will be expected to operate at the same level of transparency as required by a government department. http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/fi les/resources/government-ict-offshoring.pdf

HAMPSHIRE’S CREESE ‘MOST INFLUEN-TIAL’ IT CHIEF: In a welcome morale-boost for local government, Jos Creese, chief infor-mation offi cer at Hampshire County Council, has been named the UK’s most infl uential IT chief. Creese, who is a member of the gov-ernment’s CIO council and immediate past president of Socitm, heads this year’s CIO50 list compiled by publisher, silicon.com. Joe Harley, government and DWP CIO was in third place with Ailsa Beaton, director of informa-tion, Metropolitan Police Service and Dylan Roberts, chief offi cer (ICT), Leeds city council, placed fi fth and sixth. www.silicon.com

©iStockphoto.com/Chris Price

July/August 2011 5UKauthorITy IT in Use

NEWS UPDATE

Five boroughs on track for a shared cloud

Ambitious plans for fi ve local authorities to share IT services in a private cloud

are taking shape in south west London. Chris Pope, director of transformation at London borough of Merton, told the SmartGov Live conference that his borough, along with Kingston upon Thames, Sutton, Richmond and Wandsworth, will jointly procure:

• data centres, reducing the number of data centres from fi ve to two, each capable of serving the fi ve authorities;

• desktop technology. “Thin client and virtu-alisation is the way ahead,” Pope said;

• directory services, which Pope said are especially vital in a shared infrastructure;

• network. The consortium will procure a point-to-point network across all fi ve boroughs.

As far as possible, all services will be pro-cured from existing frameworks. While the project will create a private “cloud” for the boroughs, Pope voiced scepticism about the wider cloud model, at least in the short term. Cloud applications for local government are “few and far between... the provider market is not there to give us software as a service.”

LONDON AUTHORITIES GO FOR SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE FUTURE: Transport for London and the Greater London Authority have signed a fi ve year agreement with Asite for the use of collaborative software as a ser-vice platform. According to the company, Asite’s technology will provide TfL and the GLA with a single integrated data manage-ment solution for all aspects of the contract administration process across their con-struction and facilities management works. TfL staff as well as their entire construction supply chain will use Asite’s applications to manage contract change and to provide real-time visibility of their schedule and cost position against budget.

Poor project management and an inability to share best practice hampers the potential

of information technology to transform public services.

The CBI has called on the government to harness the potential of information technol-ogy to transform public services, in its report ‘System Reset: Transforming public services through IT’. The report claims that the public sector is failing to make effective use of tech-nology, which could make accessing public services easier for the public and businesses, while saving taxpayers’ money. IT can also revolutionise frontline service delivery and should not be viewed as just a support func-tion, as the Open Public Services White Paper recognises.

CBI head of public services policy, Emma Watkins, said technology could really revolu-tionise the way our public services operate. “From giving police offi cers and midwives handheld devices so that they can update and access records on the move, to enabling the public to access more services online, good IT can reap huge benefi ts for citizens and tax-payers. But there are worrying signs that the

Northampton’s apps

Northamptonshire has launched iPhone and Android apps, plus a general mobile

browser, for popular council services. The council worked with local University of Northampton to build the apps in prepara-tion for the 80% of people it expects to be accessing the internet via mobile devices within the next fi ve years. This fi rst phase of mobile ambitions has been promoted and marketed and usage will be closely moni-tored to determine strategy ongoing. Plans under consideration for the next phase include a dedicated app for libraries, local routes and maps and further development of the mobile browser.

public sector is starting to view it as a risky investment. In fact many technologies are available as off-the-shelf products and are already being used, but because there is no formal sharing of good practice, the benefi ts remain largely unknown.”

Ten lessons the CBI identifi es could help har-ness the potential of IT:1. Contract for outcomes and value. Don’t

over-prescribe. 2. Agree at the outset what should be meas-

ured - and measure it. 3. Manage IT systems effectively in order to

yield benefi ts. 4. Standardise systems and data models. 5. Give staff a leading role in the design and

implementation of IT change. 6. Start discussions now about investing in

future technologies. 7. Good service outcomes should trump

compliance with prescriptive rules. 8. Changes of policy should take account of

the consequences for IT systems. 9. Challenge services to drive innovation and

save cost. 10. Don’t let security paranoia hinder effec-

tive working. www.cbi.org.uk

Resetting public sector systems

July/August 20116 UKauthorITy IT in Use

Citizens will have say on public service transparency

A white paper on open public services will be followed by a consultation on

transparency, says Cabinet Offi ce minis-ter, Francis Maude. The consultation will set out plans to implement the govern-ment’s promised “right to data”, Maude said, promising “the most ambitious open data agenda of any government in the world”. The focus of the transparency pro-gramme is now shifting beyond Whitehall, to what he called “embedding openness” into wider public services. As the fi rst step, ahead of the white paper, he announced plans to release datasets from transport, criminal justice, education and the NHS. See page 10: Setting the Free Data Example

Greying society wants face time

Three out of four older citizens would choose offl ine over online services,

according to new research sponsored by Fujitsu.

It fi nds a growing digital-disconnect between older people and councils as authorities move more services online. According to the research, 65% of older people said: “it would be diffi cult for me if local council services were only provided on the internet”. Conversely, 55% of coun-cillors do not believe accessing services by internet is diffi cult, suggesting a fundamen-tal mismatch of beliefs. Eighty six percent of councillors agree that more people using the internet to access their services saves their council money; yet just 15% of older people have used a local council website to fi nd information In addition, most older people (73%) said they would still visit or phone their local council to receive services, even if more services were online.http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/EU/uk/pdf/research/age-report-exec-summary.pdf

Government Digital Service to get teeth: For the fi rst time, Whitehall’s IT team is to have the power to enforce its policy across central government. According to the Open Public Services white paper, the new Government Digital Service “will have the authority across central government to co-ordinate all government digital activity”. This will include “encouraging the commission-ing of the best user-centred digital services and information at lowest cost from the most appropriate provider”.

Such authority would give the Government Digital Service, part of the Cabinet Offi ce effi -ciency and reform group, much more power than its predecessors. Previous Cabinet Offi ce digital teams - from the Central IT Unit to the Offi ce of the e-Envoy to the Offi ce of the Chief Information Offi cer - found their strate-gies frustrated by departmental and agency policies.

The much-awaited white paper makes sev-eral references to IT’s potential to drive effi ciencies and promote choice in public ser-vices. “Opening up public services will allow providers to innovate and to accelerate the introduction of new technologies,” it states. These include service-specifi c technologies such as telehealth as well as generic tech-nologies, for example “using cloud services in the newly opened back-offi ce services”.

The paper specifi cally dismisses the Directgov slogan of “public services all in one place”. Instead, it says the Government Digital Service will develop a digital mar-ketplace, opening up government data, information, applications and services to other organisations, including the provision of open application program interfaces for all suitable digital services. The GDS will con-sider a “quality mark” to maintain public trust in digital services, including those from third parties.

NEWS UPDATE

Don’t rush in to digital by default, say MPsPublic services should not be made “digital by default” until they are proven to work for their intended users, including those without access to the internet at home, the infl uential Commons Public Accounts Committee has warned.

In a generally upbeat report following the National Audit Offi ce’s latest review of ICT in government, the committee welcomes the “direction and principles” of the govern-ment’s new ICT strategy but picks up several areas of concern. “There is a long way to go before government can say it is living up to its claim that there is ‘no such thing as an IT project’, the committee warns.

The report makes several recommendations to the Cabinet Offi ce effi ciency and reform group (ERG), which is charged with imple-menting the strategy. These include:

• The strategy implementation plan, due to be published in August, should include a small number of measurable business out-comes, to enable government and critics to measure success and value for money.

• To recognise that the strategy cannot be carried out by central government alone, “the ERG should use its new powers selec-tively and be able to demonstrate that it has achieved buy-in from departments and suppliers”.

• The ERG should publish its starting gate reviews and other signifi cant reviews during the lifetime of projects.

• The ERG and other relevant departments should withhold sign-off of additional online services until they are satisfi ed that the service is designed for users. The ERG should also continue to ensure that online services are accessible through libraries, post offi ces or other alternative means.

• The strategy should pay more attention to cybersecurity, which the committee says is mentioned only once. “This is particu-larly concerning given the move to more government services online.”

SELF-SERVICE ACCESS FOR HEALTHCARE AND EDUCATION: The austerity-stricken healthcare and education sectors will expe-rience radical change to become self-service industries by 2020, suggests a new report from Steria. In the future EU citizens will be able to access sophisticated self-diagnosis tools to help cut waiting list times and improve patient care, and hospitals and surgeries will carry out remote diagnosis through virtual video or teleconference appointments. In schools, textbooks will largely be replaced by the internet in classrooms, and touchscreen, interactive white-boards will be regarded as standard. www.steria.com/futuresreport

Londoners want joined up city

Londoners want better cooperation between public sector services, as well as closer com munication with their city leaders, according to IBM’s Smarter Cities Survey.

There appears to be a strong belief in localism in the capital; surveyed Londoners said that responsibility for improving their city falls upon local councils (53% rated them as one of the two most responsible bodies) and the mayor (42%). The local community (32%) was seen

as more important, in terms of improv-ing the city, than central government (24%). However, despite this focus on the council, the services that surveyed Londoners felt are most important are health, policing and education (in that order) – policy areas that the council doesn’t directly control.

Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, appeared on the Smarter Cities Sofa at BASE London conference: to discuss the report’s fi ndings: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVzO1QrXaGM

July/August 2011 7UKauthorITy IT in Use

ITU LIVE: TECHNOLOGY & COLLABORATION

Is today’s technology good enough to enable the public sector to collaborate – securely and cost effectively – both across and

between organisations? Helen Olsen asks the ITU Live panel.

David Wilde, as CIO at Westminster, has been instrumental in the ground-breaking ‘tri-bor-ough’ initiative whereby the council is joining forces with both Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea to share service deliv-ery in key areas – including social care and children’s services.

Enabling offi cers across three councils to work together and safely share sensitive information was a challenge laid at technolo-gy’s door. And it has been a challenge, admits Wilde. “From the IT side we have spent a lot of time base-lining costs. For example, social care in each organisation not only had dif-ferent business processes but also different systems.”

Crucially, leaders in the three councils set out a clear and unifi ed agenda: “It is not about changing the political structure; it is about economies of scale, standardisation and improved quality of services through reduced costs,” says Wilde.

Gilles Polin, Adobe’s European head of government services, reports that the tri-bor-ough work is “quite unique” across Europe in terms of both the autonomy and the size of the organisations involved. “Also, the level of forward planning is impressive.”

One of the big challenges in the tri-borough initiative, which “probably affects most local authorities”, says Wilde, is the legacy system infrastructure coupled with contractual com-mitments “that roll out to 2016”. It will take a fi ve year programme to consolidate on to one, common, ICT infrastructure. “The real challenge for the CIO – anywhere in shared services – is, how to reconcile the immedi-ate need and desire for operational, line of business services to merge quickly and keep pace with technology without undermining, fatally, how that technology can enable.” The answers are not irreconcilable, he says, but tactical issues need to be tackled ahead of the ‘end goal’ in order to make it easier for teams to merge in the short term.

Whilst technology enables many things, the success of ventures like tri-borough is not dependent on technology, but on people.

Mark Brett, head of information assurance at Socitm, agrees that we often get “too hung up on the technology” when in fact transforma-tion is mostly an issue of cultural change. “If we make bad decisions when we are trying to change these services, we can damage the trust and the reputation of the organisation… If a website gets compromised the immediate reaction is back to the customer centre and then back to face-to-face.” A year’s cost sav-ings can quickly be wiped out.”

He points out that the local government data handling guidelines have been in exist-ence for four years, but some organisations “have not bothered to take this into account. Citizens just won’t stand for that anymore.” In addition, he warns, fi nes from the Information Commissioner will get worse - and he urges the ICT community to see the “valuable and free” guidance available on the ICO’s website (www.ico.gov.uk).

Wilde feels that the roles of SIRO (senior information risk owner) and CIO sit well together and that CIOs need to fi ll the current void in information governance and com-pliance and move to proactive, rather than reactive, data assurance.

There are some diffi cult challenges ahead for the IT community in the public sector, says Wilde. “People are employed in jobs that we no longer need, but let’s address that head on and look forward rather than looking at today. For example, we are still looking at websites, while the private sector is looking at apps. We risk missing the boat and for transac-tional services that is absolutely the future.”

It is issues such as these that Socitm’s ‘Planting the Flag’ strategy is trying to answer, says Brett. “Programmes like David’s will provide some of the real learning that can be captured to reuse elsewhere.” The problem, he adds, is that there are “so many competing costs for organisations that the governance and policy - and even legal requirements - aren’t always at the top of the list. The pressures on frontline services are enormous. We need to think differently.”

We are in an electronic era, he contends, but still fundamentally working “in the ways of paper”. People don’t understand the damage of an intangible asset - an electronic copy of data - going missing. “If they were carrying around £50 notes they would be a little more aware of it!”

Wilde has been effective in ‘selling in’ the crucial role and potential of technology to ‘connect’ in the tri-borough initiative spe-cifi cally, he believes, by not explaining the technology: “Don’t try and explain to people what cloud is, because they don’t care. What they are interested in is, will it save me money? Will it compromise my service? And will it improve the end user experience?”

The panel agreed that the technical pro-fession too often get bogged down in the widgets and the technology, and that it needs to be “more comfortable” thinking in an “out-come based way”.

As with many of the issues under debate, says Brett, this is a key part of the journey in the “professionalisation of IT”.

Indeed, as Polin points out, technology is pervasive and central – to both govern-ments and to citizens. “People expect a 24/7 government that acts more like the private sector. Citizens are eager to access infor-mation online, and there is an opportunity for governments to accelerate this change and make savings. But they must get the technology right.”

Audience polls

82% say technology is key to successful collaboration and joint working.

70% say collaborative working such as the ‘tri-borough’ is vital to surviving the cuts and frontline organisations should aspire to this.

Working Securely, Together

www.UKauthorITy.com/ITUlive View ITU Live now! ITU Live is sponsored by Adobe UK

David Wilde, Westminster* Helen Olsen, ITU Gilles Polin, Adobe Mark Brett, Socitm

* David Wilde is the new CIO at Essex CC

July/August 20118 UKauthorITy IT in Use

Council’s deal with IBM fails to hit savings target

A joint venture company set up with com-puter giant IBM to save Somerset County

Council millions of pounds failed to meet some of its contract targets, and may never reach them, a report reveals.

The report, completed a year ago but only now released by the council, admits that a new SAP software system put in to stream-line purchasing had big teething problems for staff and suppliers.

The county council and IBM set up joint ven-ture company Southwest One in 2007. Avon & Somerset Police and Taunton Deane Borough Council are also partners. The contract was drawn up to deliver back-offi ce services such as procurement and human resources and produce £192m savings to the council alone over 10 years. The report said that so far only £6m of savings had been delivered, with £60m to come. Earlier this year, the coun-cil announced it was to renegotiate its area of the contract and bring some services and staff back in-house.

POOR INTEGRATION HARMING EMER-GENCY CARE: A lack of data on patient outcomes and benchmarking is hampering the performance of ambulance services, according to the National Audit Offi ce (NAO). A report says that emergency care systems are not fully integrated with those in hospitals, leading to long turnaround times at hospital accident and emergency (A&E) departments. Criticising a 10-year-old government policy of measuring ambulance performance solely by time to respond to an incident, the report says that improvements to the whole urgent and emergency care system will depend on its working more coherently. www.nao.org.uk

Trusts receive £1.2m shared savings

Funds of £1,192,000 due to the Department of Health as a shareholder of NHS Shared

Business Services (NHS SBS) have been dis-tributed to existing NHS SBS clients.

John Neilson, chief executive of NHS SBS, said: “With ambitious savings targets to reach, NHS trusts are looking at ways to ensure funding remains focused on quality and patient care. NHS SBS has demonstrated that trusts can make proven cost savings in their back offi ce, as well as benefi tting from added value services. Our commitment to working in partnership with NHS trusts is fur-ther demonstrated in being able once again to distribute more than £1 million to our exist-ing clients.” www.sbs.nhs.uk

Reinvest efficiency savings in IT, say doctors

General practitioners have called for cuts in acute services budgets to be spent on

IT to improve patient care.

More than half of GPs (57%) believe that at least 10% of effi ciency savings made by hospital services will need to be rein-vested in IT to deliver better patient care, according to a survey carried out by health IT analyst Silicon Bridge Research and Doctors.net.

The survey, supported by the IT industry association Intellect, also showed a split among GPs on how they expect IT projects should be funded in England. The majority (51%) saw necessary funds having to be pro-vided by the Department of Health or the new NHS Commissioning Board, while only 17% expected NHS trusts to provide their own internal sources of funding.

Google pulls health records system

Web giant Google is to close its online health records system, apparently leav-

ing the fi eld open to Microsoft. The company said that its Google Health product failed to create “the impact we wanted” and will be closed on January 1, 2012. The prod-uct was launched in the US in 2008, shortly after Microsoft’s HealthVault product. Online repositories for health records, controlled by patients, were seen as an essential step in the US with its fragmented health service. They also attracted the attention of the UK government, which is examining their use in its planned “information revolution” for the NHS in England. HealthVault is already being tested in NHS pilots.

Cabinet Office takes the reins of NHS IT

Christine Connelly’s departure from the post of head of health information at the

Department of Health means that the Cabinet Offi ce is now fi rmly in charge of the world’s largest civil IT programme. One of the fi rst tasks facing her temporary successor, Katie Davis, parachuted in on loan from the Cabinet Offi ce’s Effi ciency and Reform Group, will be to extricate the NHS in England as pain-lessly as possible from discredited “local service provider” contracts to impose stand-ard systems. Another priority for the new NHS IT chief will be aligning the Department of Health’s Information Revolution strategy (for England) with the overall government effi ciency programme. Connelly’s deputy, Paul Jones, ruffl ed some feathers recently by insisting that the NHS would not try to enforce the “digital by default” mantra. “The information revolution is not about forcing anyone who is not comfortable with the idea to transact online,” he said in an interview.

E-health heads for the cloud

NHS electronic health records will become available through cloud computing tech-

nology from next month in a pilot project under way at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London. Researchers at the hospital are working with Edinburgh Napier University and cloud technology supplier, Flexiant, on “a next-generation e-health platform”. If successful, the project will raise questions about the need for costly dedicated IT infra-structure developments elsewhere in the NHS. However it is also likely to provoke new concerns about electronic health records’ privacy and confi dentiality. Professor Bill Buchanan of Edinburgh Napier University, said, “The current infrastructure in the UK often has a non-integrated approach to patient care, where data is not used effec-tively between GP, hospital and assisted living. Our system allows for data to be stored with its context, such as where it was cap-tured, and then used in whatever way is necessary through well-managed clinical services.”

NEWS UPDATE

Out on the moors, but still connected

Connecting North Yorkshire has received funding of up to £16.4m from Broadband UK to bring high-speed broadband to everybody in the region and all businesses by 2017.

Led by North Yorkshire County Council, the broadband pilot project is working with a range of partners to bring high quality broadband to the country’s largest rural population. NYnet, the council’s broadband company, is also working with the European Regional Development

Fund to secure match funding to bring the total investment to £25 - £30m.

County councillor, Carl Les, said that the council was determined to bring broad-band to all: “The ability to offer services such as remote access to computers and servers, video-confer-encing, web-meetings and access to a company teleph-ony system will put North Yorkshire on a level playing fi eld with the major cities such as Leeds and London.”John Benson accesses the internet in a remote area of North Yorkshire

July/August 2011 9UKauthorITy IT in Use

NEWS UPDATE

Scottish government looks to shared services for ICT savings

Scotland’s public sector could make massive savings in its informa-tion and communications technology (ICT) spend if all organisations

worked together, fi nds a new report.

Proposals for saving the public sector up to £1bn in ICT spending over the next fi ve years have been sent to the Scottish government by former IT executive turned academic, John McClelland. His review of public sector ICT infrastructure recommends an overarching national ICT strategy to address national needs and that each part of the public sector, such as universities or councils, should move quickly to shared procurement and use of ICT.

Finance secretary, John Swinney, welcomed the review: “The review states that it should be standard to request all public services online and ICT technologies should support more integration across different sectors. That is a vision which the whole of the public sector should aspire to. www.scotland.gov.uk

RURAL SCOTLAND ON LOW ROAD TO DIGITAL REVOLUTION: The Scottish government has criticised plans drawn up in Whitehall for the roll out of 4G mobile technology across large areas of Scotland. Richard Lochhead, Scottish rural affairs secretary, said: “The UK Government position on mobile does not currently meet the needs of rural Scotland and we will continue to press for them to work with us to develop the 4G network, to overcome many of the current problems.”

EU FALLING BEHIND ON E-LEARNING: A survey of how 15-year-olds use computers and the internet to learn fi nds that European countries trail behind the rest of the world. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found that, of 19 countries surveyed, no European nation made it into the top fi ve. Students were tested on their ability to evaluate information on the internet and navigate web pages to test their digital reading skills. Korea topped the table followed by New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Hong Kong. Iceland was the fi rst European country in sixth place, followed by Sweden in seventh.

NETHERLANDS PUBLIC SECTOR GOES OPEN SOURCE: Half of all public administrations in the Netherlands (51%) have a strategy for open source or are preparing such a plan, and half (53%) have specifi c plans to use more of this type of software, fi nds a survey for the Dutch govern-ment. The survey also shows that 66% of all public administrations in the country support the vendor independent electronic document format, ODF, and have made it an option for their staff (69%).

ICO FINES SURREY FOR DATA BREACHES: Surrey County Council has been fi ned £120,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Offi ce for a “serious breach” of the Data Protection Act after sensitive personal information was emailed to the wrong recipients on three occasions. The ICO said the fi rst incident, which took place in May 2010, was the most signifi cant. A member of staff working for one of the council’s adult social care teams emailed a fi le containing information relating to 241 people’s physical and mental health to the wrong group email address. Recipients included transport companies including taxi fi rms, coach and mini bus hire services.

ICO FOCUSES ON NHS: NHS organisations face fi nes of up to £500,000 unless they manage patient records more effectively. Christopher Graham, the information commissioner, says that he will have no hesita-tion in fi ning NHS trusts if they continue breaching data laws. He believes the health service is beset by systemic problems with its approach to data security. In recent months, staff have lost laptops, memory sticks and sent patients’ records to the wrong people. www.ico.gov.uk

July/August 201110 UKauthorITy IT in Use

TRANSPARENCY

Setting the Free

Data ExampleMichael Cross welcomes government’s eagerness to practice what it preaches when it comes to Transparency.

Politicians, notoriously, are generally keener on transparency when they are in opposition than in government. After

a year in offi ce, the coalition government is seeking to demolish that truism with an unprecedented open-data programme. The reason to take the commitment seriously is that open, re-usable, data underpins the whole ‘Cameronist’ agenda for public ser-vice reform.

A few days before publication of the open public services white paper, Cabinet Offi ce minister, Francis Maude, announced a time-table for the next releases of datasets in a presentation to the Institute of Government. Maude also announced a consultation on the new “right to data”, where he was joined on the panel by his open data guru - Professor Nigel Shadbolt - and, perhaps more sig-nifi cantly, by the NHS medical director, Professor Bruce Keogh, and the information commissioner, Chris Graham.

Graham - no government poodle - indicated that his offi ce sees making a nuisance of itself in the cause of transparency just as important as doing so to protect personal information. For a start, he suggested that someone use the Freedom of Information Act to try to extract data from Nottingham City Council, the one local authority still resisting requests to publish all items of spending over £500.

He also indicated sympathy in principle for adding more detail to the national crime mapping service at the Police.uk website - precise locations of anti-social behaviour in public spaces, for example.

Maude announced a specifi c timetable for releasing datasets from transport, criminal justice, education and the NHS over the next year. Several of the promised releases are likely to arouse controversy. In the case of the raw data behind rail timetables - sched-uled for release in December - the problem is that most of the information belongs to private companies. Maude criticised the “slightly blinkered approach” of transport operators in being slow to release timeta-bling data for third party development.

The government’s approach is to persuade companies that they will benefi t more from public access to their data than they would

from the sales of their own timetabling apps. The plan is that for data on road-works on the strategic road network to be published from October, with local authority streetworks registers to follow during next year (subject to consultation). All remain-ing government-owned free datasets from the Transport Direct website, including the cycle route database and the national car park database, are to be made available for free re-use from October.

Another potentially contentious area is criminal justice. After a rickety start, Police.uk is emerging as a major success story for online public services, with some 400,000 unique visits each month. The Cabinet Offi ce Transparency Board has heard that that the Crimestoppers organisa-tion has had signifi cantly more calls since Police.uk launched. Current plans for devel-opment include integrating British Transport Police data and including “what happened next” data so that citizens can see whether a crime led to a prosecution and conviction.

Maude also announced that, from November, the government will pub-lish sentencing data by court. Although anonymised, details will include the age, gender and ethnicity of those sentenced, the sentence given and the time taken at each stage from offence to completion of the case in court.

Trickier issues may surround the publication of NHS data, a particular hobby horse of the Cabinet Offi ce’s new head of transparency, Tim Kelsey, founder of the Dr Foster com-pany. Maude announced radical extensions to the availability of data about the perfor-mance of named organisations, especially GP practices. Datasets to be made available are:

• Comparative clinical outcomes of GP practices in England (from December).

• Prescribing data by GP practice (from December).

• NHS hospital complaints data (from October).

• Clinical audit data for all publicly funded clinical teams in treating key healthcare conditions (from April 2012).

• Data on staff satisfaction at each NHS provider (from December).

• Data on the quality of post-graduate medical education (from April 2012).

Kelsey has a strong ally in Professor Bruce Keogh, NHS medical director, and one of the driving forces behind the publication of individual heart surgeons’ surgical mortality rates. He said that publishing the data would allow patients to evaluate their local doctors objectively. “Rumour and word of mouth are no longer good enough,” he said.

Reaction from some doctors was cool, with the British Medical Association warning against the creation of “simplistic league tables”.

Dr Laurence Buckman, chair of the BMA’s GP committee, welcomed transparency in principle, but warned that outcome meas-ures are diffi cult to interpret. “There are many factors which will affect one person’s health outcome – what other diseases they have, for example, or what healthcare sup-port or social care is available to them. Any national audit would have to be suffi ciently sophisticated to take this into account, otherwise we could end up with simplistic league tables which, without context, could mislead the public.”

Similarly, publishing GP practices’ pre-scribing data without the context of the demographic of the population will make it impossible for people to interpret the infor-mation appropriately, Dr Buckman said.

Keogh said that to avoid such risks it was essential that the initiative be led by GPs. But he warned that not all clinicians would be comfortable with the new regime. “Some are going to fi nd this very diffi cult but I’m going to make no apologies,” Keogh said. “Some will fall by the wayside, but most people will use the data to improve their services.”

Finally, almost as an afterthought, Maude revealed that he is working on applying the £500 spending disclosure regime to central government. Data from government pro-curement card transactions will appear on departmental websites from the end of September. That will surely be the real test of a government practicing what it preaches.

©iStockphoto.com/Henrik Jonsson

July/August 2011 11

Advances in technology have undoubtedly affected the learn-ing environment, but how has this impacted our approach to the development of effective training? Helen Olsen invites key eLearning thought leaders to the debate table.

What Comes First:

Training or Technology?

So, what comes fi rst: training or tech-nology? According to Clive Shepherd, eLearning guru and chair of the eLearn-

ing Network, the answer is “obviously” training: “But actually it is quite a tricky question because the two are inter-woven. However, technology is just a medium, a channel, for communicating. But on the other hand, online technology is a very big deal indeed; it is so much grander in scope than any other technologies we have engaged with in training. It is incredibly versatile; we can collaborate and communicate, and it is also pervasive – we all have access.”

Matt Wicks, managing director at creative digital agency, The Virtual Forge, has a differ-ent view: he believes that “technology is the prime driving force precisely because tech-nology is so pervasive and so invasive. Just like technology was a driving force behind the industrial revolution, the way in which soci-ety engages with technology on a day-to-day basis today will inevitably be brought into the learning environment.”

However, Andy Jones, senior learning con-sultant at Thomson Reuters, believes that “What comes fi rst is the performance or behaviour change you want to effect, or even starting with the question, ‘Do we want to change behaviour?’”

Technology, he says, has become such a strong driver: “People become entranced with the technology, when actually it is just a tool.” The danger is that we develop train-ing with the technology we have, rather than designing the training we want. Equally, the traditional educational paradigm brings its own problems, says Jones: “We have mod-ules and classes, and courses and curricula - all very 1850s educational approaches. The question we should be asking is, why is that important? We can do so much more!”

All agree that technology is a vital tool in the learning and development toolbox.

Consumerisation of technology

Two of the greatest global technology trends today are the advance of mobile and the astonishing uptake of technology in general – such that many workers now have more

sophisticated technology at home than they have at their disposal at work. Surely, this must have an impact on training?

“Consumerisation is outside the workplace,” says Jones. “Inside the workplace people are often not empowered or enabled to use the technologies that they are used to using at home.” It is also a question of the willing-ness to use that technology at work. “Take Yammer, you can be directive and say ‘use it’ in the workplace, but very few will.”

As Shepherd points out, only a very small proportion of people create new content on social media, “The majority don’t participate. So why would they suddenly participate in corporate social media?“

Video & stories

“Video is the one thing that learning and development has criminally ignored over the last few years,” says Jones. “We have an audience, whether in work or out of work, who are extremely used to video and TV, but we just don’t use it very much.”

Wicks points out that the technology - once a barrier in terms of cost and dissemination - is now within the reach of all organisations.

Jones is enthusiastic about the art of story-telling and its power in learning: “If you think of any kind of traditional learning, stories are how humans have related and exchanged knowledge since time began. If I want to get an example over to you I tell you a story. You can video someone telling their story with all their life, all their energy and passion. And that comes through. It is a very simple medium to show ‘what I did to get over this issue’, ‘here is how I solved that problem’. It can be very simple, very short, and that is important.”

What is ‘good’ eLearning?

Good, agrees the panel, has to mean effec-tive. And in austere times, in terms of quality, that might mean “just good enough”.

However, adds Jones, “There is also an argu-ment to say that if Apple were just ‘good’ then they would be incrementally making their

products a bit better than the competition. But actually what they do is a bit different. The challenge is aiming for effective, and if that means different then we should be different.”

That has to be the right answer, agrees Shepherd. “The classic defi nition of quality is ‘fi t for purpose’. You could argue that if you are doing something that is more than good enough then who has given you permission to waste the organisation’s resources!”

Wicks agrees that as long as eLearning “delivers what it needs to deliver then that it is fi t for purpose”. But he feels that the way to achieve good quality results is to think outside the box: “There are solutions out there that will deliver, but people don’t look around and make use of the new things that allow you to create something that is different.” For exam-ple, he adds, web conferencing creates new opportunities for collaboration and learning.

Technology & training

In live audience polls during June’s live debate an overwhelming 97% said that the increasing use of technology enhances our opportunities for learning. And the panel unanimously agreed with this: technology is opening up new opportunities that sur-pass the physical classroom and traditional approaches to learning. It provides new channels for engaging with people, telling stories, sharing knowledge and helping them to learn and practice the skills they need.

Of prime importance though is effective-ness. New technology offers the opportunity to deliver more effective, less expensive training experiences than the simple online tutorial. And with both the continuing fall in the costs of these technologies and with the rising consumerisation of technology, those opportunities will prove exciting indeed.

DEBATE: ELEARNING

UKauthorITy IT in Use

Watch the debate now at: http://adobeenterprise.tv/?video=what_comes_fi rstFor more information about Adobe eLearning technologies email: Adobe@ukauthority.com or visit: www.adobe.com/uk/products/elearningsuite.html

Helen Olsen Editor, IT in Use

Clive ShepherdeLearning Network

Andy JonesThomson Reuters

Matt WicksThe Virtual Forge

July/August 201112 UKauthorITy IT in Use

Big society IT for the police could lead us back to the future, warns Michael Cross

Standardisation

Vs. Innovation

In the long and painful history of comput-erising the public services, probably no arm of government has had such a rough

time as the Home Offi ce. Even HMRC and the Department of Health can’t match the run of IT-based project fi ascos achieved by the diverse arms of the criminal justice system. In particular, those of the police.

Against this background, it is fairly obvi-ous why the home secretary thinks we need a radically new approach to police computing.

Theresa May’s announcement to the Association of Chief Police Offi cers that she plans to create a new police-led IT supplier was made in the spirit of ‘surely this can’t be any worse than what we’ve got already’. As May said: “The way we do things now is confused, fragmented and expensive. It is absolutely clear that the current system is broken.”

However there’s a lot more to the plan than desperation. In the context of the ICT strategy and the government’s wider plans set out in the Open Public Services white paper, the police-led IT company may well turn out to be a prototype for things to come throughout the public sector IT scene. Including the possibility that the clock may be turned back a decade or more.

In her speech, May recognised the impor-tance of good ICT - in the back offi ce as well as on the front line. But she slammed the way police forces spend their annual ICT budget of £1.2bn. “That is a very large sum. I wouldn’t be concerned about the size of that sum if I were convinced that it rep-resented good value for money. But it does not.”

She described current practice of pro-curing by individual forces as “confused, fragmented and expensive”. Across the police service there are around 5,000 IT staff, working on over 2,000 systems, across 100 data centres, she said. “This is clearly not sensible.”

The consequence is duplication, unneces-sary expense as bidding costs get passed on, and a shortage of skilled people to negotiate and manage large ICT contracts. Spreading professional skills around 43 forces “makes no sense”, she says.

If this verdict sounds familiar, it may be because, 10 years ago, the government was saying very similar things about the man-agement of IT in the NHS. The response, in England at least, was to prescribe “ruthless standardisation”, by removing the choice of systems from NHS trusts and GP practices through the NHS national programme for IT.

Wisely, May did not mention that prec-edent. But while her radical plan for police IT appears different on the surface, it could run into similar obstacles to that for the NHS.

May’s big idea is to create an in-house pub-lic-private hybrid supplier. While deliberately not prescribing what the “police-led ICT company” would look like, she listed some fundamental design principles. The new enterprise will:

• Be police led. “The police need to be at the heart of defi ning what systems and services they need. They must have a fundamental and a controlling interest in the new police ICT company.”

• Be staffed by IT professionals. “[The company] will be negotiating and man-aging contracts worth many billions of pounds – this is not a job that can be given to amateurs who have a fl air for computing.”

• Have a culture that allows it to attract and retain skilled and innovative indi-viduals. “It must have the incentives in place to drive a more commercial and more effi cient approach that will save public money.”

• Exploit the purchasing power of the police service as a whole. “It can do this by aggregating the requirements of as many forces as possible, preferably all 43 forces.”

Each of these fundamental principles may be sound in itself. However the combination should be ringing alarm bells, both within and beyond the police IT community. For a start, there is a confl ict between May’s desire for the company to be “police led” while at the same time commercially minded.

Unless “police-led” simply means specify-ing functional outputs (which is what good IT procurements should be doing now) there

will be a temptation for the company’s lead-ership to become involved with technical details and gold-plating specifi cations.

Giving police a “fundamental and control-ling interest” in the business would create its own diffi culties: public sector-owned IT companies have been tried before - some of the old regional computing centres in the NHS worked on this basis - but they devel-oped a reputation for lethargy and lack of innovation.

And as for central government leaning on each police force to accept the same IT as its neighbours, this risks creating the same kind of disengagement that plagued the NHS national programme.

According to the Open Public Services white paper, the new Government Digital Service “will have the authority across central gov-ernment to co-ordinate all government digital activity”. This will include “encouraging the commissioning of the best user-centred digi-tal services and information at lowest cost from the most appropriate provider”.

No doubt lessons have been learned, and perhaps some way will be found to nurture agile competition at the cutting edge whilst standardising core applications. The same goes throughout the public sector, wher-ever services are managed by geographical location. While there is a clear need for cen-tral IT infrastructure - the Police National Computer, the NHS data spine, the DWP Customer Information System - there must also be room for innovation and tailoring to local circumstances and priorities.

In comparison with its predecessors, the coalition government has been commend-ably quick to grasp the importance of digital technologies to public services. It has also shown a willingness to be open to new ideas. However it has not yet defi ned where the boundary lies between central procurement of standard systems and allowing organisa-tions to sink or swim through innovation. For a government committed to localism and open public services based on digital inno-vation, this is a serious shortcoming.

Those concerned by the gap should make their voices heard - preferably in the “lis-tening period” for the open public services programme. We have until September.

OPINION: OPEN PUBLIC SERVICES

©iStockphoto.com/code6d

July/August 2011 13UKauthorITy IT in Use

VIEW OVER WESTMINSTER

Full House, Fulsome

DebateHacking and foam pie throwing aside, Tim Hampson looks at NHS reforms, localism and digital strategy inside the house.

When it comes to noisy debates in the Commons, few can match the unbridled hostilities of an appear-

ance at the despatch box of health secretary, Andrew Lansley. Labour’s pack now hounds the wounded minister. His signature legisla-tion was chopped, changed and assembled into a different order to defuse objections from the Lib Dems and the massed ranks of the NHS professions.

For the moment, the Tory’s right noisily rallies behind Lansley, pointing their pikes at the sky and not his back. Their eyes look in two direc-tions. Across the house to what they perceive are the less than frightening fi ghting ranks of Milliband’s foot soldiers and sideways towards the eyes of the real enemy, with whom they share government. The Lib Dems are like clownfi sh swimming through a sea of anemones, protected from the lethal stings.

Lansley looks as grim as a man who just had a tooth removed without an anaesthetic; and the wrong one taken out at that. Clegg looks, as he always does these days, like the birth-day boy who has been told he cannot win at pass the parcel. His misery is palpable.

The top down reform of the NHS has bottomed out. Where once there were clarion calls for commercialism there is an empty feeling from the right that not much has changed. The government can trumpet it has listened. While the opposition believes Lansley was pushed into a gigantic falling off an edge, not witnessed since King Kong fell of the Empire State Building, in truth, a junior minister could have introduced the health service reforms, without wasting any of parliament’s time, and most of the rows needn’t have happened.

Of course, it is not yet clear where any of this will leave plans to introduce the electronic patient record. However, one thing is cer-tain, Google technology can no longer be the panacea - the US company has pulled out of its patient record project.

Localism our way

On meeting Bob Neill, MP for Bromley and Chislehurst, it easy to imagine him standing in the lounge bar of a comfortable rural pub on a Friday night, holding a beer glass con-taining a half-supped pint of bitter. Indeed, you would be not too far off the mark, as the amiable minister for just about everything

also includes community pubs in his port-folio. As an advocate for ‘well run locals’ he has become something of a national treasure.

His responsibilities also include oversee-ing new freedoms and fl exibilities for local government, together with new rights and powers for communities and individuals to decide what they want to do with taxpay-ers’ money, which are enshrined in the localism bill. Regarded as a ‘super safe’ pair of hands it remains to be seen if taking on the brief of introducing new control cen-tres for the fi re brigade will cause more smoke than fi re.

This particularly hot, if not burning potato, follows on the from the scrapping last December of a multi-million pound scheme to replace 46 fi re control centres in England with nine regional sites.

The ill-fated Firecontrol project suffered a series of long delays and rapidly increas-ing costs since the Labour government announced it, several years ago. The project was supported by neither the Fire Brigade union nor local government and as part of the fall out, no one yet knows what to do with eight purpose built, fully equipped control centres which now stand idle and empty. They are currently about as useful as the beach volleyball court on Horse Guards Parade will be after the London Olympics is fi nished.

The National Audit Offi ce concluded that the project wasted £469m, blaming the lack of consistent leadership and ineffective governance.

Further fanning the fl ames, the Public Accounts Committee heard the fi nal cost of the project could be as high as £649m and was looking for someone to blame. Enter, the DCLG’s senior civil servant, Sir Bob Kerslake, for a bit of a roasting

Indeed, South Norfolk MP, Richard Bacon, was so angry he nearly spontaneously combusted, especially when Sir Bob admitted that the project had been ambi-tious and complex, that there had been insuffi cient analysis, poor project manage-ment and that there were fl aws with the IT system.

MP for West Suffolk, Matthew Hancock, sur-mised the project had cost £400,000 for each of the country’s 1,400 control staff and asked “wouldn’t it have been better to buy them all mobile phones?”.

The PAC’s published report is likely to be incendiary, but for now it is Bob Neal who is damping things down. He wants to achieve improved resilience and effi ciency using enhanced technology by “encouraging increased collaboration - in a locally deter-mined manner”. The phraseology is about as useful as “muscular liberalism”.

Each fi re authority will have up to £1.8m to spend on technology in their control centres. And they can spend it how they want pro-vided in a “locally determined manner” the government agrees to it.

Well that’s localism for you: you can do what you want providing Whitehall approves.

Digital strategy

Public services should not be made “digital by default” until they are proven to work for their intended users including those without access to the internet at home, the infl uential Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has warned.

In an upbeat report following the National Audit Offi ce’s latest review of ICT in govern-ment, the committee welcomed the “direction and principles” of the government’s new ICT strategy but picks up several areas of concern. “There is a long way to go before government can say it is living up to its claim that there is ‘no such thing as an IT project’”, warns the committee.

The report makes several recommendations to the cabinet offi ce effi ciency and reform group (ERG), which is charged with imple-menting the strategy. The MPs want the ERG to recognise that central government alone cannot carry this out: “The ERG should use its new powers selectively and be able to demonstrate that it has achieved buy-in from departments and suppliers”.

The MPs also say that t he strategy only pays lip service to cybersecurity. “This is par-ticularly concerning given the move to more government services online,” states the PAC report.

©iStockphoto.com/Chris Schmidt

July/August 201114 UKauthorITy IT in Use

FRAUD

The key in the fi ght against fraud and error is data, and collabo-ration, says Helen Olsen.

Nowhere

to Hide

Data from local authorities has helped identify fraud hotspots where suspected benefi t cheats can expect a knock on

the door over the summer.

A new mobile regional taskforce has started in two areas of Birmingham - Perry Barr and Kingstanding - re-examining claims for all benefi ts and tax credits. Ministers have pub-licly urged cheats to admit their crimes and pay back the money before they are trapped and taken to court - and, potentially, to prison. And they have announced plans to take the taskforce to other ‘’high risk postcodes’’ from the autumn, in the most determined effort yet to cut the bill for benefi t fraud.

The drive is possible because the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has interro-gated data held on its fraud referral system in greater detail than ever before. Information was gathered from the DWP, Revenue and Customs and from local authorities holding data on council tax benefi t and housing ben-efi t. All supplied the DWP with details on the number of fraud referrals and the number of occasions action has been taken - to identify ‘hotspot’ areas by postcode.

Lord Freud, the welfare reform minister, said: ‘’The new taskforce is our latest weapon in tackling welfare fraud on the front line. People who are receiving the correct benefi ts and tax credits have absolutely nothing to fear,” he said. “But if people have deliberately not told us of a change in circumstances, they should do so now - before the team comes knocking at their door.’’

Lord Freud said that it would be even easier to catch cheats when the universal credit is introduced, gradually from later in the parlia-ment, automating the benefi ts system.

Fraud hit squads are part of a wide-ranging strategy to reduce welfare fraud and error overpayments by one quarter - £1.4bn - by March 2015. The strategy includes the use of private-sector analytical techniques to screen tax credit applications before payments are made, to save £256m over four years.

The National Fraud Authority (NFA) estimates that fraud alone costs the public sector around £21bn a year. The bulk of the loss is due to fraud against the tax (£15bn) and bene-fi ts (£1.5bn) systems. Local government is also facing signifi cant threat to the public purse, accounting for £2.1bn of fraud each year.

Across the whole of the public sector £2.4bn is lost to procurement fraud, £515m to grant fraud, and £329m to payroll and recruitment fraud each year.

This burden simply cannot be borne in our age of austerity.

The attack on fraud forms one of the corner-stones of the government’s effi ciency and reform agenda. The Taskforce on Fraud, Error and Debt, established late 2010, is a high-level, cross-government group with a primary focus on combating fraud. It has brought together fraud professionals from both private and public sectors, overseeing eight pilots that tested new approaches to tackling fraud, including the more effi cient use of credit refer-ence agency information, deployment of data analytics, and use of insights from behavioural science to improve how fraud is combated.

It is fair to say that there has been a step change in how seriously the government is now taking fraud. Indeed, moves are afoot to adopt an all-pervasive, cross public sector, zero tolerance culture, rather than the current ‘pay fi rst, check later’ environment.

According to an interim report from the task-force, there are “huge opportunities to reduce fraud through better coordination across Whitehall, between Whitehall and the rest of the public sector, and indeed between the public and private sectors”.

Initiatives covered in the taskforce report include commissioning credit reference agencies to verify the circumstances of 20,000 benefi t and tax credit claimants and tracking down over-payments made to suppliers and asking for money back.

In one pilot, the report said that HMRC invested £1m, secured from contract rene-gotiations with an IT supplier, in an innovative screening technique for tax credit applica-tions. The tool analyses information provided by prospective claimants on their tax credit application form, compares this against internal and external data, from credit refer-ence agencies for example, and decides the likelihood of the application being fraudulent. “HMRC piloted the exercise on approximately 4,000 new tax credit applications to test proof of concept and subsequently piloted the new process preventing losses of £10.63m between September 2010 and March 2011,” the report states.

In this interim report the Taskforce has agreed four priorities for tackling public sector fraud:

• Collaboration – silos must be removed; all parts of the public sector must work together by: sharing intelligence on fraud-sters; developing cross-cutting capabilities; initiating joint projects using data analytics; and ensuring we jointly procure data ana-lytics to drive down costs.

• Assessment of risk and measurement of losses – fraud risk must be assessed before projects and programmes are under way. Losses should also be recorded and reported via the quarterly data summary.

• Prevention – investment and resource should go into prevention, not just detec-tion and punishment. When vulnerabilities are detected as part of risk assessment, they should be designed out.

• Zero tolerance – there is no acceptable level of fraud.

According to cabinet offi ce minister, Francis Maude, steps taken to tackle the £21bn worth of fraud a year across the public sector saved £12m in their fi rst few months. Announcing the taskforce’s interim report, Maude said that the eight pilot projects had shown “immediate and startling results” and, indeed, signalled the end of the “pay fi rst, check later” cul-ture. He urged public sector bodies to work together and share intelligence on fraudsters through joint procurements of data analytics and other services in order to progress the fi ght against fraud.

But the government should be doing more to get “under the skin of fraudsters,” said Vicki Chauhan, director, government prac-tice at BAE Systems Detica. According to Detica, as government automates services, with the new Universal Credit for example, exposure to cyber threats, opportunistic and organised fraud will increase. “As govern-ment increasingly takes its services online, it will be important that criminal behaviour is better understood - drawing on expertise and existing data from across sectors can spot suspicious activity early on and successfully prevent fraud before it occurs.”

http://www.cabinetoffi ce.gov.uk/resource-library/eliminating-public-sector-fraud-counter-fraud-taskforce-interim-report

©iStockphoto.com/Krzysztof Zmij

July/August 2011 15UKauthorITy IT in Use

PRODUCT & COMPANY NOTES

Siemens pushes PSN

Having been instrumental in shaping devel-opment of the Public Services Network

(PSN) Siemens Enterprise Communications is promoting its benefi ts to the public sector.

According to Siemens’ director of public sector strategy, Michael Bowyer, “While the PSN will drive effi ciencies in procurement, it will also reduce the cost of supporting exist-ing infrastructure, provide the ability to reuse existing assets, deliver operational fl exibil-ity and reduce operational expenditure. It is more important than ever to embrace PSN and deliver signifi cant cost savings through shared services.” Working together with BT, Siemens claims to be the only partnership able to provide the comprehensive range of communications services necessary to fully support the successful development of PSN. www.psnsiemens.co.uk

MODELLING DISASTER MANAGEMENT: A consortium led by the Met Offi ce and includ-ing IBM, Imperial College Business School and Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London has received funding from the Technology Strategy Board to prove the concept of Open Platform. The group will create a technology enabled busi-ness platform, like that of Google, iTunes, Amazon or EBay, which allows different types of data to be combined, exchanged and modelled with other types of data to understand impact, in a bid to create an online marketplace to exchange knowledge, data and modelling techniques between the government, disaster risk reduction and insurance sectors.

SHARING THE CLOUD JOURNEY: UNIT4 has launched Shared Journey, a new cloud based solution for public and private sector organi-sations using its Agresso Business World and Coda Financials enterprise software solu-tions. Available on subscription basis, Shared Journey allows groups of public sector bodies or not-for-profi t organisations to work together to quickly set up and launch a shared services operation based on either Coda or Agresso. Each organisation/division within the shared service can obtain all the benefi ts of cloud computing while maintaining the highest level of independence/identity, and delivering group benefi ts and effi ciencies. www.unit4.com

POTHOLE? WE’VE GOT AN APP FOR THAT…: Buckinghamshire citizens can now report highway defects with Masternaut’s new iPhone app. People can photograph and report a pothole, loose paving, broken bol-lard or faulty street light and send the geolocation and information direct to Transport for Buckinghamshire for action by the highway maintenance teams. www.masternaut.co.uk

KENT TO SELL IT SERVICES TO OTHER COUN-CILS: An IT organisation set up by Kent County Council is to begin selling a package of IT services for schools to other authorities. Kent Technical Services is working with Getronics, a provider of hosted desktop services, and is marketing the package, Ubiquitous Desktop Solutions, following a pilot at a primary school. It includes hardware and software aimed specifi cally at the education sector. www.technicalservices.org.uk

PARENTMAIL LAUNCHES PARENTAL ENGAGEMENT: ParentMail +Pay has launched ParentMail 2 along with a mobile app for parents, ParentPlanner. The product consolidates information for parents from every school, club or nursery their children attend into one single account so they can keep better informed and also deal with the huge amount of day-to-day eventu-alities involved in bringing up their children. www.parentmail.co.uk

VIRTUAL PC SHOWCASE: Researchers at Birmingham City University have revealed ground-breaking technology that will lead to ‘virtual PCs’ being available to millions of remote users – everywhere and anywhere. Project leader, Dr Peter Rayson, said: “This is an innovative software platform which allows users to have their own ‘virtual PC’, with their personal fi les and settings, on any machine with internet access, anywhere in the world. The cloud platform provides content and apps to inform, interact, socially connect and even entertain, as well as delivering all essential services and educational require-ments. The uniqueness of this technology is that it is accessed via low cost USB devices plugged into any available PC.

NEXT GENERATION NETWORK OPERATIONS: MLL Telecom has completed its next gen-eration Network Operations Centre (NOC), signifi cantly improving its ability to moni-tor and manage its network services. “The new NOC will help us deliver a range of new benefi ts to our customers. For example the improved intelligence provided means that our customers will now be able to receive management information at any location via devices such as the Apple iPad and be able to act upon it quickly,’ said MLL’s Gary Marven. www.mlltelecom.com

Transforming multi-channel customer experiences

Adobe has launched ADEP, the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management (CEM). The platform enables organisations to build immersive, multi-chan-

nel digital interactions for today’s social and mobile customers.

The company is also delivering a new set of Customer Experience Solutions, built on the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, to help drive personalised, targeted connections and campaigns both online and offl ine. For IT organisations, the platform helps to optimise cus-tomer interactions across all lines of business.

Adobe’s new offering is a modular, open, standards-based platform for delivering engaging digital solutions across social, web, mobile, and print channels. It provides organisations with a unifi ed foundation to make, manage and deliver multi-channel digital experiences leveraging HTML5, Adobe AIR, Flash Player and Adobe Reader

Mobile application development also gets a boost through integration with Adobe Flash Builder and Flex. Integrated with the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 now include new support for building mobile applications for Android devices, BlackBerry PlayBook, iPhone and iPad.

ht tp : / /www.adobe .com/solu t ions /cus-tomer-experience/enterprise-platform.html http://www.adobe.com/solutions/customer-experience.html

Atos eTHOS

Atos has launched the eTHOS Identity Authentication service, providing

secure access to local and central gov-ernment services. The company has also signed a framework agreement for the provision of secure authentication ser-vices to UK regional authorities, initially focused on members of the LondonPSN. Atos will serve the framework through the launch of the ‘eTHOS Identity Authentication’ service. This new service includes all four lots of the framework covering a range of two factor credentials for one time passwords; local edge ser-vices for remote access; federated core Identify Provider services and, through partnership with the Post Offi ce, a fl ex-ible, national registration capability at low cost. The Atos identity provider will be tScheme accredited and services will be made available on an output based, per user pricing model. http://uk.atos.net/en-uk

July/August 201116 UKauthorITy IT in Use

CONTRACT ROUNDUP

HEALTH

CHEDDAR MEDICAL CENTRE has selected Jayex’s Enlighten waiting room manage-ment solution. Enlighten provides the centre with innovative, cost-effective workfl ow technology designed to assist in improving patient experience from arrival through to consultation. Cheddar will be utilising the technology to provide the practice with up-to-date demographics, trend information and to inform purchasing decisions through controlled patient feedback.

GATESHEAD HEALTH NHS FOUNDATION TRUST has completed a deal with the Sits Group, which takes it closer to a fully vir-tualised data infrastructure for some of its most critical departments. With currently 80 virtualised and 40 physical servers in its infrastructure Gateshead Health sought a secure backup and recovery management system as part of an ongoing virtualisation project for departments such as A&E and pathology. The VMware environment is accessed by over 2,500 users across three sites.

LEEDS TEACHING HOSPITALS NHS TRUST is working to develop an open source portal to give clinicians a single view of data held in its patient administration system (PAS). The portal, Protean, is in pilot phase and was developed using the Eclipse software development environment. The server layer uses Java programming, while the presen-tation layer uses the JavaScript library Ext JS to create an open source rich internet application layer framework, allowing users to access portal tools through a browser.

MID YORKSHIRE HOSPITALS NHS TRUST has selected Zeus Technology to help manage its key medical applications. At any given time, 500 employees can be using one of 150 web-based systems to access medical records and patient results via the trust’s two datacentres.

NHS GLOUCESTERSHIRE has deployed Tunstall Healthcare to help clinicians manage patients with long-term con-ditions. The one-year programme will improve patient outcomes and reduce

hospital admissions by delivering a man-aged system of care and timely responses, through the use of telehealth.

NHS PROCUREMENT HUBS has signed an agreement with Computacenter to offer VMware virtualisation technology to NHS trusts. The programme is led by the NHS Commercial Procurement Collaborative which, together with the NHS Shared Business Services’ procurement arm and London Procurement Programme, chose Computacenter following a competitive tender process through the buying solu-tions framework.

NHS SHARED BUSINESS SERVICE has chosen Certero to provide a power man-agement product, available for use by the wider NHS and to allow organisa-tions to easily apply power policies and profi les across all their desktops. NHS SBS was established in 2005 to help NHS trusts streamline back-offi ce functions and deliver greater operational effi ciency, thus enabling key staff to focus on frontline care.

SECTRA has selected SQS to manage testing function across the £35m NIPACS programme for Northern Ireland. The project provides digital management of all radiology information and images throughout the public healthcare system in Northern Ireland. SQS’ role includes the provision of a structured method-ology and set of processes to support every stage of testing and ensure correct approach to minimise risk of defects in the system.

UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS BIRMINGHAM, with TIBCO Spotfi re, has implemented a new system that helps clinicians and man-agers make decisions. Spotfi re’s virtual ward bed reviewer enables senior nurs-ing staff to make bed allocation decisions more quickly and easily, with better access to patient data. The system aggregates all sources of data used in the hospital and provides a user-friendly interface that interrogates the data, providing real-time answers to questions.

FIRE

HAMPSHIRE FIRE AND RESCUE SERVICE (FRS) plans to share services over its new 999 network with both other fi re services and local authorities. Procured under a shared framework agreement form, the network - supported by Virgin Business Media - is said to be both secure and compliant with the government’s Public Sector Network. In addition to connect-ing 51 fi re stations, and the fi re service’s headquarters, wider connections to 16 other partners in the framework have been enabled.

HAMPSHIRE FRS has adopted Astium GEO-Information Services’ SAFEcommand solution to ensure its fi refi ghters receive critical frontline emergency information. Fire crews in the service’s 130 appliances now have access to the latest operational data including potential risks at an incident location - such as gas cylinder storage or how to gain access to particu-lar stretch of river - from their in-cab terminal on the way to an emergency call.

HEREFORD & WORCESTER FIRE AND RESCUE SERVICE has awarded Telent a contract for the provision of a SEED Command & Control Mobilising System and Cyfas Integrated Communications Control System. The system will enable secure, effective dispatch of fi refi ghters and resources to emergencies through-out the county, leveraging the latest technology for automated vehicle location to give dynamic, real-time mobilisation. The contract, issued via Hereford’s prime contractor, Computacenter, is the fi rst of its kind to be let in England since the government announced its decision to cancel the national FiReControl project which would have provided similar functionality.

MERSEYSIDE FIRE & RESCUE SERVICE is pushing forward in the post-FiReControl environment with a corporate gazetteer management system from Aligned Assets. The Symphony Bluelight system will see the service building on the work achieved during the FiReControl project in matching its exist-ing address data to the NLPG in order to create one defi nitive gazetteer that will be used throughout the service.

NOTTINGHAM UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS NHS TRUST is using Cisco Cius and Nervecentre Software to help redi-rect 8,000 hours of nursing time a year into hands-on patient care. A study by the Association of Chartered Certifi ed Accountants showed the deal is deliver-ing cash savings of £97,000, an estimated £292,000 per year of avoided costs in extended lengths of stay, and improved patient safety and increased staff sat-isfaction. The system includes a Cisco medical-grade network to provide both wired and wireless network access, a real-time workforce management system from Nervecentre; and 11 Cisco Cius tablets.

July/August 2011 17UKauthorITy IT in Use

CONTRACT ROUNDUP

BARNSLEY METROPOLITAN BOROUGH COUNCIL has selected a library management system from Capita-owned Talis to benefi t over 220,000 citizens. The software will allow the council to provide improved, intuitive services such as reservations, catalogue search, payment of fi nes - by phone, email, post and SMS.

BOLTON COUNCIL has gone live with Liquidlogic’s PROTOCOL Integrated Children’s System. The system integrates with Capita One, Bolton’s educational management system, providing an essential multi-agency link for the council. Liquidlogic has worked closely with Bolton to migrate over two million case notes and 100,000 children’s assess-ments from the council’s legacy system.

CAMDEN BOROUGH COUNCIL has selected Computrace to protect its laptops and the data held on them. The council operates a mobile security policy strategy based on industry-standard recommendations around password protection, hard disk encryption, data protection, and computer tracking. It has already activated Computrace on 1,300 of its laptops to address the computer tracking and data protection element of this.

CARMARTHENSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL has deployed Xsigo virtual I/O as part of a server consolidation initiative. Users can now quickly and easily connect any server to any network and storage device through a consolidated infrastructure. Because the I/O Director delivers up to 40Gb bandwidth per server connection, it allows IT administrators to increase server consolidation ratios and accelerate management tasks such as vMo-tion and data backup.

CHESHIRE WEST AND CHESTER COUNCIL has awarded Civica a contract to provide an integrated system for its case management across its legal department. The new system will be based on Civica Legal software, which gives the legal teams web-enabled applica-tions and modern infrastructure to ensure centralised single process for case man-agement, court bundling, billing and debt recovery.

CROYDON COUNCIL has deployed Human-Concepts OrgPlus Enterprise solution. The council is using the Software as a Service

(SaaS) version of OrgPlus Enterprise to manage its organisational structures for more than 10,000 staff more effectively within the new budget constraints.

DORSET COUNTY COUNCIL and Kcom have signed a four year framework agreement (with the ability for services to continue for a further seven years) to supply a wide area network and unifi ed communications. The network will be a shared resource available to any public sector body in Dorset and sur-rounding areas. Initially the network will extend to approximately 400 sites, involve unbundling over 30 BT exchanges, and will incorporate two data centres and consoli-dated connections into government services.

GLOUCESTER CITY COUNCIL has improved business effi ciency by using a budgeting and forecasting system from Advanced Business Solutions. The software has helped to reduce budget loading time from ten days to just minutes and to better monitor, evaluate and improve its fi nancial performance by replac-ing spreadsheets with real-time monitoring of fi nancial plans and forecasts.

GLOUCESTERSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL is adopting a multi-agency approach to children’s services to support more effec-tive early interventions and has chosen Liquidlogic’s PROTOCOL Integrated Children’s System and PROTOCOL e-Enabled Common Assessment Framework (eCAF). Up to 1,600 social care and health practitioners from agencies including the council’s CYPS, edu-cation, health, police and youth services will access the new systems.

LEWISHAM BOROUGH BUSINESS AGAINST CRIME says it has reduced town centre crime by 62%, as a result of using NBIS (National Business Intelligence System) from Hicom. Using NBIS, the organisation is able to share data on offenders quickly and easily between retailers, the police and other crime reduc-tion agencies nationwide.

LEWISHAM has reselected Capita Local Government Services to provide systems support for its revenues and benefi ts service. The contract, worth £1.4m over fi ve years with option to extend for a further two years, runs from June and is a continuation of the existing 18 month systems support service contract.

LONDON LIBRARY CONSORTIUM is sub-scribing to Smartsm to drive effi ciencies around its shared collections. The tool helps libraries practice the proven Evidence Based Stock Management Methodology, allowing them to manage and develop their collections based on evidence.

NEWCASTLE-UNDER-LYME BOROUGH COUNCIL has selected Becrypt Trusted Client to deliver secure mobile working to its offi c-ers. The council has ordered 90 licences for Trusted Client, which will be supplied to staff on USB sticks giving them secure access to

the council’s virtual private network remotely. Managed in a central resource pool, staff from all departments will be able to use the USB sticks for mobile and home working. The solution is also part of the council’s disaster recovery plans to ensure business continuity.

NORTH NORFOLK DISTRICT COUNCIL has signed a contract with Concerto Support Services to deploy Concerto Assets software to manage and maintain its diverse property estate. The software will allow the council to address the data issues with the view of centralising, cleansing and improving asset data.

POWYS COUNTY COUNCIL has chosen LogRhythm’s integrated log management and Security Information Event Management solution to help cut the cost of complying with government and payment card industry data security standard regulations. The coun-cil will also use the product to proactively identify and remediate internal and external security threats to its critical IT infrastructure.

REDBRIDGE COUNCIL and Virtual Viewing have launched a website that uses 3D mod-elling to show the development potential of Ilford town centre. It has been described as a one-stop shop for would-be investors. The site allows users to take a virtual tour of the area while making key documents such as due diligence papers, urban design reports and planning policy accessible in one easy-to-access place. www.investilford.co.uk

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

FINGAL COUNTY COUNCIL is using Nathean Technologies’ Logix to identify cost savings and effi ciencies council-wide, including signifi cant savings in energy bills, as well as reductions in pro-curement costs such as plant hire. The tool is also being used to analyse housing and citizen service needs.

LIVERPOOL CITY COUNCIL is set to refresh its joint venture contract with BT after securing an improved deal. Liverpool Direct Limited was formed in 2001 and runs the city council’s ICT service, con-tact centre, one-stop shops, together with human resources and payroll, the reve-nues and benefi ts services, and the social care service, Careline. In addition to a £9m discount on the cost of the contract and £17.5m of investment in ICT, BT has agreed to spend £18m on projects which will create jobs and fund housing and social care programmes between now and 2017.

LAMBETH has appointed Capita preferred bidder for a collaborative partnership to deliver a range of services encompassing and extending the existing revenue collec-tion contract administered by Capita and additional services including management of the council’s call centre operations, ICT support services and a benefi ts resilience service. For these core services the con-tract is expected to be worth £60m over 10 years with the option to extend for a fur-ther fi ve years.

July/August 201118 UKauthorITy IT in Use

CONTRACT ROUNDUP

RENFREWSHIRE COUNCIL has selected Certero’s PowerStudio PC Power Manage-ment solution to help it achieve its PC-related cost and energy savings targets.

RUTLAND COUNTY COUNCIL is deploying Symphony iManage from Aligned Assets for managing its LLPG, Local Street Gazetteer and Associated Street Data. It is also using Aligned Assets’ integration module, Symphony iExchange, to automate exports of gazetteer data into back offi ce systems as well as those to the national hub.

SOUTH BUCKS COUNCIL has awarded a contract worth £11m for back offi ce ser-vices including ICT to Steria and Northgate. In a seven-year deal, the suppliers will deliver a wide range of services including accountancy, software implementation and maintenance as well as hardware and con-sultancy. Revenues and benefi ts, including collection and recovery of council tax and benefi ts, forms part of the deal.

SOUTH OXFORDSHIRE AND VALE OF WHITE HORSE district councils have extended their existing contract with Capita to deliver rev-enues and benefi ts, fi nancial and customer services through a shared services arrange-ment. The extension is for a period of three years, to July 2016 and is worth some £8.9m. As a result of the original contract both authorities saw their very best council tax collection rates last year.

TOTALNOTTS consortium of Nottinghamshire public sector partner agencies, has pro-cured Covalent Corporate Performance Management for collaborative use across eight local authorities to improve organi-sational results by actively managing goal-critical Key Performance Indicators, avoiding data overload and allowing man-agers to take timely corrective action where necessary. Totalnotts comprises Bassetlaw, Broxtowe, Gedling, Newark & Sherwood, Rushcliffe, Ashfi eld, Mansfi eld and Nottinghamshire councils.

TUNBRIDGE WELLS BOROUGH COUNCIL is the 20th council to deploy SecurEnvoy’s SecurAccess for its network. SecurEnvoy randomly generates any required keys within the customer’s environment meaning there is nothing relating to its customers’ security stored at SecurEnvoy and therefore customer details could never become compromised.

WANDSWORTH used ICT integrator Fordway Solutions to manage a successful infrastruc-ture improvement programme, increasing network availability from 95.8% to 99.8% and signifi cantly improving user satisfaction. Projects have included installing SCCM and SCOM, upgrading the VMware platform, set-ting up network monitoring and addressing problems with the borough’s extensive thin client terminals, including the installation of Microsoft APPV to enable applications to be launched more quickly.

WARRINGTON is using a computer-gener-ated 3D model of its town centre to support ambitious regeneration plans for the bor-ough. Created by aerial mapping company, Bluesky, the model will be used to show how proposed town centre regeneration schemes would look after development. The model was supplied ready for use in the council’s Computer Aided Design soft-ware application – AutoCAD - and in Google SketchUp.

WILTSHIRE COUNCIL has confi rmed its Azzurri Communications contract for an IP telephony solution for its 5,000 staff; the pro-ject has been delivered on budget and within 50% of the planned timeframe. After review-ing potential suppliers through the buying solutions framework, the council selected Azzurri on a pilot basis and subsequently re-engaged the company to implement, support and manage a hosted Mitel-based platform.

CARDIFF AND VALE COLLEGE, formed by the merger of Barry College and Coleg Glan Hafren, is implementing a fi nancial man-agement system from Advanced Business Solutions. This integrated system, which will include electronic procurement and workfl ow functionality, will improve fi nan-cial reporting and support the new college’s sustainable agenda by eliminating time-con-suming paper-based processes.

DUNDEE COLLEGE has installed a Liberty Library Management System from Softlink. Being able to use email and texting tools to alert students if they have overdue books has saved the college time, effort and resources, prompting it to be more proactive and giving it greater control over stock. It has also sig-nifi cantly reduced costs by streamlining the whole library management process.

GENERAL TEACHING COUNCIL FOR SCOTLAND is developing an online man-agement tool for student teachers using C2 Software. The GTCS has offered a similar system, also developed by C2 Software, to probationary teachers for the past four years through its MyGTCS portal.

KILMARNOCK COLLEGE is to transform effi -ciency levels and improve fi nancial control by implementing a fi nancial management system from Advanced Business Solutions. The new system, which has integrated electronic workfl ow and document imaging functionality, will enhance the reporting and accessibility of fi nancial information across the college.

UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH has selected Objective Corporation’s content, collabora-tion and process management solution to enhance the way the organisation manages its documentation.

WESTMINSTER has signed a £190m pan-London IT framework with Virgin Media Business for a PSN-compliant Next Generation Network resource that could act as a one-stop procurement shop to London’s public sector for buying phone, data, video, CCTV and WiFi services. Any public sector organisation in the capital will be able to sign up to the framework,

potent ia l l y g e n e r a t -ing millions of pounds worth of sav-ings from s i m p l i f i e d procurement, s t a n d a r d i -sation and sharing tech-nology used by different o r g a n i s a -tions.

LUTON BOROUGH COUNCIL is delivering a wide range of frontline council services using GIS from GGP Systems. Holding more than 190 individual layers of mapped infor-mation ranging from addresses to parking zones, gritting routes, potholes and street lights, the system can be accessed by more than 3,000 staff via the council’s intranet. Members of the public can also access the data via the council’s website where it can be used to report a range of defects and service delivery reports.

©iStockphoto.com/aprott

POLICE

CLEVELAND POLICE AUTHORITY has selected Steria as its partner for delivery of the force’s control room, community justice and back-offi ce functions. The shared service partnership will deliver £50m in cashable savings. The centre will provide transformed business services based around new technologies and new electronic processes integrated with existing as well as upgraded technology.

STAFFORDSHIRE POLICE has given Sepura a £1m contract for both hand portable and mobile terminals. Staffordshire completes the quartet of Midlands’ regional constab-ularies, with West Midlands, West Mercia and Warwickshire also benefi ting from Sepura TETRA radios.

EDUCATION

July/August 2011 19UKauthorITy IT in Use

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CONTRACT ROUNDUP

BLUE BADGE IMPROVEMENT SERVICE has awarded a fi ve year con-tract to Northgate to deliver the new Blue Badge on behalf of central government and local authorities. In association with Payne Security which will print, supply and distribute the newly designed badge, Northgate will develop a secure web-based service including an online eligibility checker and application form available on Directgov, and a secure common datastore of key information on badges and badge holders to enable verifi cation checks to be made quickly and easily from desktop or mobile device. The service aims to go live 1 January 2012.

DEPARTMENT FOR COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT’S pivotal Geography Publishing Service (GPS) has been launched in the cloud. In line with the ‘more for less’ agenda, the migration of the GPS by Informed Solutions to a fully managed, cloud-hosted service is expected to realise savings in the region of 40% in the fi rst year alone for DCLG. The GPS delivers mapping and gazetteer functionality to a range of web-based applications, including the Places solution and the business critical, national Fire Incident Recording System.

GREATER LONDON AUTHORITY is implementing Asite’s Software to provide a single integrated data management solution for all aspects of the contract administration process. The software will provide real-time visibility of actual schedule and cost position against budget. 

HIGHWAYS AGENCY has signed a £57m seven year contract for a National Traffi c Information Service, which will be available from September. The service will be provided by a consortium of Mouchel and Thales UK, and cover motorways and A roads. It will replace the traffi c and data processing elements of the existing National Traffi c Control Centre contract.

LAND REGISTRY is using SAS to decode data and generate statisti-cal reports detailing the performance of its mainframe computer. The solution is delivering major time savings and a signifi cant reduction in the likelihood of errors for the organisation, improving mainframe performance.

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE has ordered 12,500 rugged tablet PCs in a fi ve year deal worth £30m. Software Box will provide the Getac tablets under the joint asset management and engineering solutions contract. The PCs will feature PGP HMG encryption. The contract includes soft-ware, installation, confi guration and maintenance support as well as access to a dedicated helpdesk.

REMPLOY and online job fi nder and training provider, MyWorkSearch, have joined forces to enhance the range of services available to disa-bled and disadvantaged job-seekers. The partnership will provide Remploy candidates with access to MyWorkSearch’s award-winning interactive eLearning content and a range of online job search tools.

SCOTTISH PROCUREMENT AND COMMERCIAL DIRECTORATE has awarded Fujitsu a place on both Lots for the IT Managed Services Framework Agreement, meaning that Fujitsu becomes one of a limited number of IT suppliers pre-approved to tender for IT managed services contracts across all public bodies in Scotland.

WELSH GOVERNMENT has awarded a four year contract for the man-agement of intelligent transport systems, including telecommunications and tunnel systems for the entire motorway and trunk road network in Wales. Winning contractors, Amey and URS/Scott Wilson, will provide motorway technology including telephones, signals, CCTV cameras and the two traffi c management centres across Wales.

WORTHING HOMES, SOUTH YORKSHIRE HOUSING ASSOCIATION and BROADACRES HOUSING ASSOCIATION have selected Asset4000 from Real Asset Management (RAM) to help process and control their asset bases and account for assets at component level in line with the Statement of Recommended Practice.

CENTRAL GOVERNMENT & AGENCIES

ReportReportThe new name for the Town Hall NewsletterThe new name for the Town Hall Newsletter

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